Journalism by robots? Whoa....

This comes from Meg Weaver, publisher at woodenhorsepub.com
Copyright (c) 2013 Wooden Horse Publishing.

 

The Long Good Read is a very special project from The Guardian, the British newspaper, and The Newspaper Club, a company that prints small-run DIY newspapers. The Long Good Read is produced by robots.

Before writers of all kinds get worried about the future of their careers, maybe we should call it “repurposing” rather than “producing.”

The Long Good Read is a collection of articles from The Guardian selected by algorithms for their lengths and their interesting content. A human then selects the articles appropriate for the issue. These are then laid out by another software tool and printed by The Newspaper Club. 500 copies are then distributed for free to another Guardian experiment, a coffee shop in East London.

You can read the whole interesting story in an article by Nieman Journalism Lab. It ends with a quote by The Guardian’s head of technology, Jemima Kiss, speaking about print: “It’s not the medium that’s in trouble; it’s the business model.”